Summary: This is the original television series. With this tour de force of control over a
bewilderingly complex narrative and a massive
cast of characters (more than 50 key roles)
constantly shifting about in both geographic
and cinematic spaces, Mani Kaul continues
exploring Dostoevsky’s fiction (cf. Nazar,
1989), faithfully following the novel’s original
plot transposed into a scathing depiction of a
feudal elite, largely bypassed by history,
located in Bombay and Goa. The story begins
with the return of Myshkin (Ayub Khan),
having spent many years in London
undergoing treatment for epilepsy. He
encounters the beautiful Nastasia (Vasisth), a
femme fatale pursued by the rich Pawan
Raghujan (Shah Rukh Khan) and the ambitious
Ganesh (Mahan). The wealthy milieu seems to
live in a vacuum, alongside a formerly
productive generation, such as the
businessman Mehta (Velani) and his proud
daughter Amba (Hansra) or the retired,
drunken colonel (Bora) who is accompanied
by characters like Killer and the cynical and
suicidal Shapit (Thulal) on the beaches of Goa.
At Nastasia’s party both Ganesh and Myshkin
propose to her, but she leaves with Raghujan
who throws a bundle of banknotes at her
which she proceeds to burn. After the central
sequence in Goa, the colonel leaves home and
dies, and Myshkin becomes engaged to Amba.
However, he suffers an epileptic fit and the
next day Nastasia breaks the engagement,
claiming Myshkin for herself. Just before their
wedding she again runs away to Raghujan who
eventually kills her, after which he spends the
night with Myshkin awaiting the police. In the
end Myshkin is revealed to have gone mad.
Kaul coolly orchestrates with great virtuosity
the continuously mobile, elusive points of
‘stress’ (in Kaul’s phrase) as they shift from
geographic location to cinematic space and
back again, from the editing and gestural
rhythms to the discontinuous soundtrack,
achieving a multi-layered cinematic texture that
at times threatens to stretch beyond the
boundaries of the frame. The innovative
approach to plot and narration keeps the film
on a precarious edge between formal control
and random collisions of speech and identity.
Much of the film’s successful use of characters
as ‘independent vertices’ (as the director
describes them) follows the extraordinary
performance of British Asian actor Ayub Khan
who uses his difficulties with Hindi to
considerable advantage as the nervous and
culturally dislocated epileptic. The director
commented: ‘Whereas for years I dwealt on
rarefied wholes where the line of the narrative
often vanished into thin air, with Idiot I have
plunged into an extreme saturation of events.
[P]ersonally, I find myself on the brink,
exposed to a series of possible disintegrations.
Ideas, then, cancel each other out and the form
germinates. Content belongs to the future, and
that’s how it creeps into the present’. The film
was made as a four part TV series running 223’
and edited down to feature length.